Thoughts

First off, just want to preface this by stating that my intentions are never to make unwelcome advances beyond my defined domain of video production, as articulated by our agreement and early conversations about my role, nor do I ever mean to be an unwanted chef in the wrong kitchen, so please do not hesitate to be as embracing or dismissive of what follows as you see fit.

I whole-heartedly believe in the product, I whole-heartedly believe in you guys, and I think you and your team have built something that can be incorporated into every school desk and every cubicle in the information-age sedentary world and benefit tens of millions of people, if not more. It’s a game-changer and I appreciate the opportunity to work with you guys very much.

That said, this is why I also feel it’s important to express full transparency about my gut-instinct hesitations going into the Kickstarter campaign (which I have since informed and confirmed with some early-stage research) in two parts:

1. In short, I think it would be a mistake to go into Kickstarter without a product name by trying to open-source this process at a later time. Here are a few of the reasons why (some of these are bullet-points for larger concepts I was planning on elaborating in person):

What’s in a name on Kickstarter?

59 of the top 60 all-time earning kickstarter projects went in to fundraising with a name that they ending up keeping when they went into production, as far as I can tell. So, it’s not impossible to go into a campaign without a name and be successful, but this is not the case for 98.33% of the top-performing situations I looked at.

2. If a name is determined necessary for Kickstarter, I don’t think that this name should be Flōt. Here are a few reasons why:

The verb itself could be misleading:

So, how I interpret float as a verb, it implies:

The key idea that makes your product stand apart from all the other products that fail is the fact that nothing is connecting your feet to the floor, but the key definition of float as a verb prerequires a substance is beneath (most commonly water) another object.

Floating is not necessarily relevant to the weight vs. lightness dichotomy (in fact, the more obese you are, the better you do float and maintain buoyancy).

Secondly, the spelling is potentially difficult for most people, yet there are also very few domain names available that utilize “flot” as an alternate spelling (since they have been taken up).